Biology Team Discovers that Sugar Propels Plants to Adulthood
Based on experiments with the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Biology has provided fresh insights into the role of sugar in “vegetative phase change,” the transition from the juvenile form of a plant to the adult plant.
“It has been known for a long time that mineral nutrients and sugars can affect plant growth, but it has been unclear until now if they trigger developmental transitions,” said Scott Poethig, a biology professor at Penn and senior author on the paper, which was published online in the open-access journal eLife.
The research was led by Penn graduate student Li Yang, and other co-authors included postdoctoral researchers Mingli Xu and Yeonjong Koo and graduate student Jia He.
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